February 27, 2020
Valtech’s Dr James Graveston recently delivered an insightful talk outlining how AI approaches can be used to re-imagine and improve patient care and operational processes in healthcare.
As a qualified doctor and engineer, James brought his experience and understanding of the healthcare sector to the presentation. The session was very well received as NHS digital transformation was a key interest for many attending the event. In his talk, Connected Healthcare: Using AI to re-imagine patient care, James outlined how innovations in the automotive, food delivery and travel/holiday sectors can be applied to NHS.
Automotive: how will connected devices make predictive monitoring a reality?
Using Connected Cars as an example, James outlined the use of real-time analytics to respond to incidents, but also to build predictive models that support proactive monitoring at home and in the community.
Food delivery: can algorithms help manage treatment resources better?
Uber Eats demonstrates how algorithms that ensure pizzas arrive hot could also be used to help manage ambulances and resources in the NHS. Today, ambulance services optimise for call-to-arrival rate, but there’s an urgent need to look at the bigger picture and optimise for the best call-to-treatment times.
Hotel bookings: could digitisation reduce delayed transfers of care?
Two key initiatives support online hotel bookings. Firstly, companies such as booking.com aggregate data from myriad sources to create a single source of truth about what’s available, where and when. They also implement and maintain data dictionaries across their operations so that resources are labelled consistently and that machines can understand the equivalence and relationships between items.
NHS Trusts need to apply these two approaches to health and social care data about patients, beds, and nursing and community resources. This will help to reduce delays to discharge through better understanding of the status and needs – both holistically and for each patient – and supporting collaboration within and between organisations. There is also better visibility for strategic planning and modelling.
Successful NHS digital transformation
Successful transformation in health will come from taking the right approach. Service design needs to involve users and stakeholders of all types to ensure solutions are relevant and actually used. We recommend taking an approach to delivery that we call ’thin slice’. This means change happens in smaller, regular deliverables that offer real value and build upon each other.
Valtech works with a range of organisations to help them realise the benefits of digital technology. From customer/user experience and creating connected services, to data science, artificial intelligence and automation, we are already helping organisations transform through data and digital.